Gaming machines, such as slot machines, video poker machines, and the like, have been a cornerstone of the gaming industry for several years. Generally, the popularity of such machines with players is dependent on the likelihood (or perceived likelihood) of winning money at the machine and the intrinsic entertainment value of the machine relative to other available gaming options. Where the available gaming options include a number of competing machines and the expectation of winning each machine is roughly the same (or believed to be the same), players are most likely to be attracted to the most entertaining and exciting of the machines. Shrewd operators consequently strive to employ the most entertaining and exciting machines available because such machines attract frequent play and hence increase profitability to the operator.
In one proposed approach for attracting players to gaming machines, an attract display image is spatially or temporally coordinated among a group of adjacent gaming machines to provide viewers with an impression that the gaming machines are linked to one another. The image may, for example, be displayed sequentially on one display after another to give the general impression of the image moving sequentially through the gaming machines in the group. In order to coordinate the displays of the different gaming machines, the machines must be physically linked to a controller device and possibly each other using a backbone communication architecture, daisy chain architecture, hub-and-spoke architecture, or the like. The controller device may be physically separate from the machines or integrated with one of the machines. A drawback of the above construction is that it adds to the cost of manufacture and may require additional submissions to regulatory agencies that must approve gaming products to be installed in gaming establishments in their respective jurisdictions. Accordingly, a need exists for a method of synchronizing display indicia on standalone gaming machines without requiring the machines to be physically linked to a controller device or to each other.